Research Themes +
Energy Technologies Area (ETA) researchers are continually building on the strong scientific foundation we have developed over the past 50 years. We address the world’s most pressing climate challenges by bringing to market energy-efficient innovations across the buildings, transportation, and industrial sectors. ETA is at the forefront of developing better batteries for electric vehicles; improving the country's aging electrical grid and innovating distributed energy and storage solutions; developing grid-interactive, efficient buildings; and providing the most comprehensive market and data analysis worldwide for renewable technologies like wind and solar.
Strategic Initiatives +
The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) Strategic Plan is the guiding force for our research and development for the next ten years. It clearly charts a path toward clean-energy solutions and focuses on five detailed Strategic Initiatives. The Plan provides an in-depth look at how ETA is accelerating research to provide affordable, clean energy to all while accomplishing deep, economy-wide decarbonization, looking to avoid a rise in global average temperature while simultaneously developing solutions to increase humanity's resilience to extreme weather volatility.
Publications
News +
For media inquiries,
please contact ETA
Interim Communications Manager
Kiran Julin

kjulin@lbl.gov
About Us +
The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) is unique in translating fundamental scientific discoveries into scalable technology adoption. Our approach combines an understanding of the marketplace and the role of state and federal regulation and policies. ETA's research drives real-world, practical results that affect and improve the everyday lives of Americans and those across the globe. Saving energy and battling the Climate Crisis are key to the foundation of our research, which is driven by technoeconomic analysis and in-lab experimentation and discovery.

Steve Harris

Principal Scientific Engineering Associate

(248) 245-1830

SJHarris@lbl.gov

eta.lbl.gov/people/Steve-Harris

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Bio

Steve Harris received a BS degree in chemistry from UCLA and a PhD in physical chemistry from Harvard University. After a Miller Post-Doctoral Fellowship at UC Berkeley, he began his career at the General Motors Research Labs. Apart from a stint at the Ford Scientific Research Labs, Steve worked at GM until 2011, when he was awarded a Miller Visiting Professorship in the UC Berkeley Chemistry Department. Since then he has worked in the Materials Science Division at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and he is presently a Visiting Scholar in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Stanford.
Steve’s work has ranged widely, and it includes studies of combustion chemistry, the kinetics and thermodynamics for growth of CVD films, aerosol dynamics modeling, fatigue failure in gears, and fracture mechanics in cast aluminum. When he returned to GM from Ford, he started work on Li-ion batteries, focusing on how the presence of heterogeneities and flaws affects ion transport, durability, and energy density. He is presently looking at the mechanics and electrochemistry at Li metal interfaces.

Harris has over 12,000 citations and an h-index of 61

Education

Physical Chemistry, PhD, Harvard, 1975

Physical Chemistry, Miller Institute Post Doctoral Fellow, 1977